#amnenas

Unlike Sdefa, which conveys meaning through the pitches of melodies, CMC conveys meaning with chords. In theory these chords could be presented in lots of different ways, with different combinations of instruments or maybe with a melody put on top, but in practice (for the time being) I’ll be using only computer-generated sounds.

That’s because doubly unlike Sdefa, which uses the twelve notes of the equal-tempered scale as its phonemes, CMC uses … well, more than that. Potentially infinite notes, if it goes on long enough. It would be an absolute nightmare to try to play on an acoustic instrument, and getting the computer to do it right is hard enough. I started learning a new computer program just for this.

Meaning is conveyed not by specific pitches, but by the chord qualities and how each chord relates to the last. I won’t get into the specifics of the tuning system or the language itself just yet, because that would be a loooong post. Instead, I’ll just present an example, which translates to “I’m going to make a new language! I started making the language. These sounds are it!”

Note the increasingly weird accidentals! If you’re not familiar with music notation, it doesn’t normally look like that. If you are … don’t worry about it. Instead, give it a listen:

It’s finally done!!! This is my submission for the Cursed Conlang Circus—a cursed musical conlang, which now has a name: Amnenas!

I have been working on this video for what feels like 42 years but is probably not actually. The language itself you may have seen snippets of here and here, but now there’s a more complete explanation and a longish translation to listen to!

There’s still a LOT of information I had to skip over because I didn’t want to make a half-hour music theory lecture with a bit of conlanging at the end. There were many, many discarded versions of the script. Maybe I’ll do a followup video at some point to fill in some of those gaps; there will definitely be some more posts about it, too.

The video itself ended up being way more complicated than I expected, which is why I only finished it like two hours before the deadline! It was a stressful last few days.

That depends! It sometimes works, but most of the time it doesn’t. You can think of it as like asking if any given string of speech sounds means something in any particular language; if the string is short enough, then it may well have a meaning in lots of unrelated languages, but the longer it gets the less likely that is to be the case.

There are fewer “phonemes” in Sdefa than in most natural languages so stuff is maybe more likely to work out than that metaphor would imply, especially if you’re a little loose with grammar rules. For example, I got asked what Big Ben says in Sdefa, and as it turns out one fragment out of five in its sequence of chimes does have a meaning (the very first part, used at 15 minutes past the hour, means “bright,” “vivid,” or “(highly) saturated”). But that’s just four notes long, and it’s very unlikely that a random piece of music any longer than that would have a coherent meaning in Sdefa.

It’s a new video! This one is a follow-up to this video, which is my contribution to the Cursed Conlang Circus. If you haven’t seen it yet, please check it out and then vote for Amnenas here. There’s only a few days left of the voting period!